


To Fire We Return

by stillwaters01



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, End of the Road, Gen, season 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-26
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-25 19:02:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3821386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillwaters01/pseuds/stillwaters01
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the day the world burned, Dean woke up the same way he and Sam always had.  Looking for his brother.</p>
<p>(Originally posted 3/5/12)</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Fire We Return

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural. Just playing, with love and respect to those who brought these characters to life.
> 
> Written: 3/3/12 – 3/5/12
> 
> Notes: Another late season seven, “end of the road” exploration that hit me out of nowhere and demanded to be written - because apparently, I’m a glutton for self-punishment. As always, I hope I did the characters and emotions justice. Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

Scattered within the tightly packed forest of John Winchester’s handwriting were glimpses of the man before the hunter; hidden fragments of broken conversations between a grieving widower and the woman he lost. A handful of words smudged by the emotion of Mary’s husband, of Sam and Dean’s devoted father, crowded amidst the solid lettering of desperately gathered supernatural knowledge.

 

_“Dean woke up looking right at Sammy again this morning. They both do it – look for each other first thing, sometimes before they even breathe. You were right – those boys really did connect like twins held apart for four years.”_

 

It was something Sam and Dean had always done without conscious thought – just another autonomic function they didn’t notice until it was broken.

 

And when it _was_ broken, it could be found within the tremors of uneven writing in their own journals – raw, overpowering, but never explicitly stated, in entries after Cold Oak, the Mystery Spot, hell hounds, and Stull Cemetery. On those days, Sam and Dean’s blurred handwriting simply stated that their brother was dead – as if committing the word “dead” to paper was somehow _less_ painful than “I looked for my brother and he wasn’t there.”

 

As if by writing _those_ words……it would make it real.

 

Dean woke up that final morning looking across the divide between the beds, directly into Sam’s eyes – eyes in a face that obviously hadn’t slept.

 

Eyes that didn’t see him.

 

There was an unspoken, but tangible result to their lifetime of silently checking in with each other – their eyes connected and the room took a breath; the world, no matter how screwed up, righted itself; the impossible became a little less daunting.

 

But that morning, the room was suffocating, sulfuric; the darkness of the world all-consuming.

 

“Sammy?” Dean rose cautiously, heart twisting as he confirmed what he already knew. What he’d known since the day he stitched Sam’s glass-ravaged hand.

 

Sam was breathing.

 

And Sam was gone.

 

Hazel eyes that had always been an open book, a visual history of their lives together, stared straight through their other half - no longer Sam, yet worse than vacant; the innumerable pages not so much wiped clean as reduced to ash, once soulful color now filled with the flicker of flames, the gleam of an ancient, smothering light.

 

A dark, Morning Star.

 

Dean sank to the floor, shivering with the sudden, icy absence of his soul.

 

There was no journal entry that day. He couldn’t write that Sam was dead when his body continued to breathe; couldn’t write what he _saw_ ……

 

…..because the ink would make it real.

 

And the paper was just going to burn anyway.

 

The smoke alarm may have been silent, but Dean knew fire intimately. He was already choking; skin tingling with the familiar, violent lunge of hungry flames.

 

The same flames consuming the eyes of the touchstone he’d waited four years to meet.

 

There were no sirens, no hope of rescue as they were engulfed.

 

Dean burned with his brother – two vessels, one soul, reclaimed by the fire that begat them.

 

With only the faded, uncharred walls of a roadside motel standing witness to the immolation.

 

 

 


End file.
